“... white explorers said to have been hailed as gods – Francis Drake, Hernán Cortés, Captain Cook, Christopher Columbus, to name a few – acquired a new star in the mid-1970s, when Prince Philip vacationed off the coast of Tanna, in what was then the New Hebrides, aboard HMY Britannia. Ever since, a string of Englishmen have made the pilgrimage to the ...”

“... transported to one of those Fifties films in which middle-aged young men in macs and hats and black spectacles are forever jumping into Daimlers and roaring down to Wallingford. The target of the British bomb, as has long been known, was not the Soviet Union but the United States. Its purpose was to restore the political co-operation that had been all but ...”

“... the interpretation eloquently enshrined in the great Lutyens Memorial published in 1950, where Christopher Hussey, in his 600-page biography, and A. S. G. Butler, in his three volumes of plans, plates and commentary, acclaimed our Ned as ‘the greatest artist in building whom Britain has produced’. Lutyens’s star was already in eclipse when this ...”

“... Krin and Spitting Image. Their jests have served to make the institution stronger than ever. Christopher Hitchens – although he can poke fun with the best of them – offers an unjestingly rational argument for abolishing the English monarchy. He begins with a perplexed description of the country’s convulsion on learning as the lead item on the ten ...”

“... too, to imagine Toni Morrison or Caryl Phillips being asked to take charge of such matters. As Christopher Miller points out in The French Atlantic Triangle, in France ‘literature was one of the most important battlegrounds for the debate on slavery.’ But in spite of the wealth of scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade, surprisingly little work has ...”

“... In The World the Plague Made he has a hard case to make, and a somewhat heartless one: that the Black Death – perhaps ‘the most lethal catastrophe in human history’ – had a silver lining.The history of plague has been much debated in recent years, though some things at least are settled. The pathogen of bubonic plague is the bacterium Yersinia ...”

“... during that episode of homicidal narcissism. He was also sure that the time was overdue to concede black Americans their natural rights as citizens, and used his coercive power on the Hill to this explicit end: the first time in history that such clout had ever been employed in that way. He threw away much of this gain by pursuing Kennedy’s fantasy of ...”

“... the yellow oval in the Miró painting that hangs nearby, and the yellow of the flowers in the Christopher Wood picture opposite. On a low table in Jim’s bedroom there’s a spiral of grey and white pebbles in a perfect grading of colour and size. Everything demands to be touched, and can’t be: visiting is excruciating, in the best way. Against one ...”

“... date back to the 1780s in Britain, where a group of abolitionists decided to establish a free black settlement in West Africa. The colony, they hoped, would ‘civilise’ a region ravaged by the slave trade, and undercut the trade by offering more profitable commerce in the products of free African labour. Under the sponsorship of the Sierra Leone ...”

“... expansion. There were also rumours of a non-Christian ally in the East, the ‘grand khan’ Christopher Columbus had hoped to find in the Indies. Many Jews believed that the Lost Tribes of Israel – who were thought to inhabit an independent Jewish state somewhere beyond the Muslim lands – would rescue the Sephardic Jews in their exile.For a while it ...”

“... three and the other aged 14 months. She then went calmly to the authorities and claimed that a black man had hijacked her car and driven off with her kids. For nine days, a racial manhunt convulsed the state. Then came the salvage of the car and the children’s bodies, the confession, the hysteria, the prayer-meetings ... It emerged that Ms Smith had at ...”

“... to words. It seems to Simón that the boy perceives numbers as ‘islands floating in a great black sea of nothingness’, that at times a distant voice from another sphere of being is issuing from the boy’s mouth. The authorities diagnose a ‘specific deficit linked to symbolic activities’ and set about transferring David to a special boarding ...”

“... of the military recruiting centres in the Bay Area. Sympathisers of the not yet discredited Black Panther Party were in evidence, as were those who had been beaten and tear-gassed alongside César Chávez in his fight to unionise the near-serfs of the Salinas Valley agribusiness empire. All the strands of ‘the movement’ were still in some kind of ...”

“... politicians to serve present purposes by rearranging light and shade on the historical picture. Christopher Addison, for example, published an edited version of his war diaries in 1934, just as he was trying to cut a figure as a Labour frontbencher. The originals had recorded the private thoughts of a man who expected to be on the winning side after the ...”

“... syllabus ‘other forms of writing and cultural production than the canon of Literature’. Where Christopher Ricks believes that it is the teacher’s job to uphold that canon, his opponents assert that it is now time to challenge various ‘hierarchical’ and ‘élitist’ conceptions of literature and to demolish the bourgeois ideology which has been ...”